There is a very good reason for wanting people to have high AA's when they join a high level guild. Why? YOU HAVE NO TIME TO DO THEM AFTER YOU JOIN!.

Oks, that's a bit of an overstatement, but not far from fact. The new raid system helps a bit.

Consider that I am at raids 7 days a week. There has not been a day where we haven't raided for months, unless there was like 1 due to a patch day insanity.

That's a solid 6+ hours a day of raiding during weekdays, 8 or more on the weekend.

If you actually work for a living, like I do, or go to school full time, it's very difficult to find time to do xp. I squeeze in a bit during the weekend, but other then that, I have 0 time between working 11 hours a day (minimum), showing up at raids and finding time to sleep.

AA's are a very good indication on average of a person's playtime. It shows dedication to your character. Having a 100+ aa's means you've spent at least 250 hours or so grinding out xp to improve your character. That shows that the potential guild candidate might put forth the effort to be a solid member.

50 hours a week is pretty average attendance btw, Flaco for example probably puts in close to a 100 hours a week.

Sreth, you say you want to have access to the uber content. Well, it's there waiting for ya to put the time in. Everquest is the biggest time sink I've ever found in a game. That's all it is. If you want easy access to uber content, go play Diablo II. The fact that guilds are where they are is closely tied into the effort that people put into their characters, and casual players don't really fit into that. The amount of farming, dieing, and learning you need to stay on the top of the game is immense, and time spent in game day after day is the only way to do it.

When it comes down to it, almost every high level guild recruits on dedication and play skill. Note the word "recruit". We choose to work together like this, this is nothing that is required by SOE when you play your char. There is content casual players see that I never have time for. I couldn't tell you what's in PoD, or PoN for the life of me, other then random visits there for flags. I walked into a zone with my secondary enc, and had no idea what people were talking about. There are different levels of content for different people for a reason.